Comcast Is Reading Your Blog

Paolo writes "A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington, writes a blog and used it to complain about the service he was getting from Comcast. Shortly afterwards he got an email message from Comcast apologizing for the problems and suggesting he might look at a guide it had posted on its web site. Lyza Gardner, a vice president at a Web development company in Portland used Twitter to complain about the company and was surprised to be contacted directly. Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers. The company was ranked at the bottom of the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index."

Comments

Good for them!

[doug141]

Reading a public blog and giving free tech support about problems posted in the blog is good.

Re:Good for them!

[griffjon]

No, it's not good -- it's putting out fires. Good would be training their call center employees to solve problems (instead of reading, tediously, from the "unplug your modem, reboot all your computers..." book)

This approach is not addressing the thousands of comcast customers who don't blog or twitter or have a "voice" online, like my parents. They still get the usual craptastic comtastic customer support.

Re:Good for them!

[garcia]

Well, in my case I whined about SAS via Twitter and got a response the next day from their VP of R&D. I was so impressed I mentioned SAS' response to my friends (and again via Twitter) and Aaron Landry used it as an example in his Web 2.0 101 presentation about how company interactions are changing the face of customer service.

While I still think Comcast sucks, the close monitoring ofsocial networks, blogs, etc is a big step.

Ok Lets try this...

[chickenrob]

I'm really upset with my comcast internet. I wish it was much cheaper and even faster.

Re:Ok Lets try this...

[Sponge Bath]

Dear valued customer, we at Comcast wish to address your concerns
and request that you contact our customer satisfaction engineers at 1-800-EAT-SHIT.

Re:Ok Lets try this...

[stsp]

I'm really upset with my comcast internet. I wish it was much cheaper and even faster.

Dude, according to the comcast article at wikipedia, you won't cause much of a stir with this. The bar's been set a tad higher already. Meet Mrs. Shaw:

On October 15, 2007, a 75-year old Comcast customer named Mona Shaw entered her local Comcast offices with a hammer and destroyed some office equipment before being arrested and fined for damages. Mrs. Shaw was angry and frustrated due to a previous encounter with Comcast customer service in which she and her husband wanted to speak with the manager and were forced to wait outside the offices for two hours before being informed that the manager had already gone home.

Actions versus words

[Dachannien]

Contacting people on teh Intarweb directly and offering them platitudes to make them change their weblog posts is easy.

Actually making improvements to your services to improve your customers' experience when regional cable monopolies ensure that you're the only game in town? That's hard.

Want a way to fix your image Comcast?

[downix]

Quit the bandwidth throttling, or conversely, just be straight forward with honest numbers about the service. I live with bandwidth throttling with my pipe, but my ISP was very straight forward with me that if the traffic load spikes they will rebalance accordingly, and that will on occasion throttle my speed in some cases. If Comcast were at least honest about issues, they'd gain a lot of respect.

So many companies are so worried about their image, they actually hurt their image more with the tactics used to keep their noses clean.

I'll be moving in a year or so to an area serviced by Comcast, and am weighing them against the FIOS thing carefully. How Comcast handles their customers will be key to that decision. Comcast used to stand for being a great cable service company, and I would like to see them stand tall again.

Re:Want a way to fix your image Comcast?

[Spittoon]

We tend to treat large companies like Comcast as if everything they do is the result of the considered thought of a single entity. That's just not the case. The Customer Support piece of Comcast is likely to be a distinct entity. Certainly they work with the rest of the company, but they've got their own agenda-- answer calls.

That means they have two things on their mind:
1. Are all the calls getting answered?
2. How long is each call and how can we shorten that time-- without doing such a poor job that call volume increases?

Call volumes are one area that Customer Support *probably* can affect only in limited ways. Divisions within a company are, in some ways, fiefdoms-- everybody filters up to a VP, and there is limited participation between Support, Network Engineering, and Product Management. Each of those groups will have their own area of responsibility which the other areas don't control-- they can only participate in projects and do their best to be a good team member.

So in the case of network policy or product efficacy, the Support operation can only affect the Network Engineering, Fulfillment (the people who ship equipment to customers), and Product Management operations to the extent that they can socially engineer the other team to do the right thing. If you know any Network Engineers you have an idea of how difficult that can be. The city of San Francisco recently learned this lesson, I think.

What Customer Support can affect is the tools they use to handle customer issues. This blog-watching guy is one of those.

If people in America would answer calls for the same rates as people in the Phillipines, then the balance of cost-to-quality for call centers would probably move further toward quality. But only maybe-- the more calls you handle the more pressure there is to generate efficiencies, which means less training and more scripting and less tolerance for calls that last a long time.

Of course, end users don't perceive any of this-- to us it's just "If Comcast would just make their service better I wouldn't have to call" and we have trouble understanding why they put effort into wacky new Support ideas like this when they should be spending that guy's paycheck on improving their network capacity so they stop being tempted to throttle bandwidth to control data transfer costs.

Oh noes!

[Aminion]

Comcast is helping their customers, yes? They are crawling/indexing/filtering blogs that are completely public, yes? So what's the problem? What am I supposed to be outraged about this time?

"It feels like nobody ever really reads my blog," he told the New York Times.
"Nobody has left a comment in months."

Oh, that's the problem. Seriously, this is a lousy post.

Re:Comcast is reading your Slashdot too

[Naughty Bob]

Not just good PR- If I ran such an unpopular company, and was serious about turning it around, I'd be looking everywhere humans go to vent, or make criticism. Then, I'd try to solve the problems I found. Where's the story?

Where's the story? Isn't it obvious?

[davidwr]

The story is that it's COMCAST.

He posted a commend on a public forum....

[sys_mast]

...and then complains because it was read and responded to? I would be bothered if it was a private intended email sent through their email relays, but not to comcast, and they responded to that. But he put it on a public, blog, WOW maybe they are using something like google searching for these negative remarks and OH MY GOSH trying to make the customer happy by suggesting things!!! WOW...OK sarcasm off. Come on, if you don't want anyone to be able to read it, don't post it on the web. Sorry to say but the title should read "dumb blogger shocked when public blog read by someone" OK I admit I'm assuming it's a public blog, but a quick scan of the article didn't indicate it was private/secured in anyway. So unless I missed something, this is a non-issue.

Really?

[Darkness404]

Comcast is now monitoring blogs as a way of improving its image among customers.

Here is an idea don't throttle P2P connections also, don't block websites, don't keep logs, and stand up for fair use and anonymity on the internet. Do that and you might be more liked. But keep throttling P2P connections and acting as a puppet of congress/MPAA/RIAA and people will hate you for it.

Do they read the newspapers too?

[ktappe]

For every blog that gets read, 100 newspapers (online or printed) get read. So one wonders if this lady will get a call too: http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080726/BUSINESS/807260323 If not, then Comcast is picking off small low-lying fruit instead of dealing with the larger, more widely seen issues. Silly.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading your blog is not big brother. The blog is public. They could have a few generic scripts that query Google for combinations of keywords, and when they show up, someone looks at the page. We have several newswatcher scripts set up at work that monitor news articles that mention our company. Nothing sinister here. You can remove the tin foil hat.

What means and methods?

[TheRedSeven]

Everyone so far seems to have been skirting the issue here. If Comcast now has a staff of people tasked with surfing teh interwebs and responding to comments about their service in blog postings, that's fine. Perhaps a misguided use of resources (how about some actual customer service instead of lip service responses to people you've already lost as customers?), but that's their choice.

If Comcast is using some sort of automatic filtering on their users' accounts that indicate whenever a user types the word "Comcast", and then responds with an email to that person's X&%YZ@comcast.net address, then there's an issue.

What we don't know, and what the article doesn't say, and what we have no way of knowing, is which of these two methods Comcast is using. A lack of transparency regarding what you pay for what you get, and a lack of transparency regarding service is already a PR issue (nightmare) for Comcast. This simply compounds that issue.

Re:Several thoughts spring to mind.

[antifoidulus]

Computers are really good at finding obscure facts. As somebody said, and has been widely quoted: Type in "Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire" and the computer will say, "Specify type of goat."

Um...no particular reason for asking this, but which search engine do you use..you know, in case I want to run that query for.....research.....purposes.

Mod Parent Redundant

[TheRaven64]

Suggesting that Twitter is trolling is so redundant it's bordering on a tautology.

But does Comcast read the newspapers?

[wytcld]

Go to news.google.com and look up "Comcast Vermont." You'll see articles in every Vermont daily paper about how Comcast has dropped 8 channels from its basic analog service (including MSNBC and Comcast's own cable news station). It's telling people who miss those stations from their $18-a-month plan they can get them back by going to a $58-a-month digital plan. The state may be able to act against this, since Comcast is only allowed one "rate change" a year, and this would be the second, if dropping channels and charging the same price counts as a rate change. Comcast claims it doesn't. In Comcast's eyes, it can drop any plan to a single channel, offer more expensive plans to those who want their channels back, and it hasn't changed rates at all.

Disclaimer: My brother-in-law is a Comcast executive. He's a decent guy.

Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[KWTm]

Not just good PR- If I ran such an unpopular company, and was serious about turning it around, I'd be looking everywhere humans go to vent, or make criticism. Then, I'd try to solve the problems I found. Where's the story?

Where's the story? Isn't it obvious?
            The story is that it's COMCAST.

Not only that, but Comcast is actually addressing its clients' concerns and negative feedback, as opposed to being oblivious to them.

Now, to really score, Comcast would need to fulfill some additional criteria:

• address it with more than just some mere "yeah, we saw your complaint, now we're responding to you with this feel-good letter that doesn't actually do anything, just so you feel that we've addressed your complaint"
• address the complaint for more than just a handful of high-visibility people with popular blogs, but rather do something about the actual corporate culture. I was going to say, "I would love to see a Slashdot posting or two from someone actually inside Comcast who would describe a positive shift in the corporate culture," but they might send a shill or two to write some false praise here.

Let me tell you something, Comcast. You ruined your own reputation. Now it's going to be real hard for you to erase that. See what happened to Microsoft? (Hey, Sony, stop snickering.)

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[KGIII]

According to the article they're trying to improve their image. I say that's friggen retarded. Why not improve oh, their service? Their pricing? Their policies? When they do THOSE things then they can work on improving their image.

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[Kneo24]

You bring up an interesting point. A lot of companies worry so much about their image that will go on PR campaigns and other stupid bullshit that probably costs them more money in the long run, and is considerably harder.

I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.

I've never understood the corporate mentality like that. Is it really better for the companies bottom line to do PR stunts instead of making their service better?

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[mpeskett]

I assume that they do the shit they do for a reason other than pissing everyone off on purpose, so that would imply that it helps their bottom line. Or at least it does until people catch on, and go elsewhere.

At this point they could improve the service, which has the downside (from their point of view) of removing the advantage to the bottom line, and may not actually help their image - the people that are really interested won't be won over quickly and will stay suspicious, the people that aren't that interested won't notice the change and will continue with the impression that the service sucks.

They *could* improve the service whilst simultaneously launching a PR campaign to make it well known that they've improved the service, which might be more successful in winning people over, but still carries the cost of yknow... actually improving the service.

If they assume that the people who know things are mostly a lost cause, and focus on the people who are actually likely to be persuaded, then they could have just as much success with just the PR campaign, possibly more success if you factor in the savings from keeping the service as it is.

You can't trust them to do what's good for the customer, but you can trust them to do what's good for their profits... if they could do better by making the service better then some analyst or advisor would have pointed this out already.

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[vux984]

I could be wrong here, but wouldn't the easiest and most cost effective way of improving your image to be doing what you had described? Service improvements. Better pricing structures. Better policies.

No. It takes both. You can't run an effective image improving campaign if nothing has changed. But if you just change and hope everyone notices on their own that's horribly inefficient. You get much better results by telling people.

As much as you may hate it, advertising works.

Re:Not JUST that it's Comcast...

[atraintocry]

Go elsewhere? For cable service? You're crazy.

And before you say satellite, think about how awesome it is to have your TV and internet go down because of some big bad trees, or the occasional rain cloud. Or those blazing fast analog modem uploads. In the areas the Comcast operates, they have a monopoly on cable service. And for TV, most people get cable now rather than OTA. So the time when those protections were necessary to create infrastructure are long over. Not to mention, the regulations that made it somewhat fairer were dropped years ago.

There's no free market here. You can't go somewhere else and get similar service. You might just have to go without. Nothing wrong with that, but not everybody can or wants to...so it will take a lot more than P2P throttling or shitty customer service, or even no expectation of privacy or even uptime to make someone want to do that. There's no incentive for them, or any other US cable company to be competitive or to improve their service. I think the PR is just bet-hedging, and often reactive, like those ridiculous ads they're all running against FiOS, saying "our fiber is way bigger and cooler".

Re: 1-800-EAT-SHIT

[TaoPhoenix]

1-800-328-7448

"High Baby ... Thank you for calling. Beautiful girls on a virtual chat line are waiting for you in their sleek little nighties ... "

Please tell me that's the new voice of Comcast Tech Support.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[Z00L00K]

If they read blogs they are accessing public information. So it is at least not invasion of privacy as it is whenever email is read/filtered.

If the reading of blogs can help to improve the service that essentially means that the ISP in question has an internal problem with their customer satisfaction tracking. But reading blogs can of course provide more meat on the bone that any issue tracking system can't resolve.

More problematic is the cases where ISP:s are reading your web habits and are injecting or replacing information in the web pages you visit. Sometimes resulting in data corruption.

Disagree: Comcast IS one big entity

[KWTm]

We tend to treat large companies like Comcast as if everything they do is the result of the considered thought of a single entity. That's just not the case. The Customer Support piece of Comcast is likely to be a distinct entity. Certainly they work with the rest of the company, but they've got their own agenda

While your premise is technically correct, I'll provide a counterpoint to your point.

Large companies like Comcast (or Microsoft or most others), with some good aspects and some bad aspects, do indeed tend to be treated as one big monolithic blob --because that's how they're asking to be treated. Comcast is using its name as a brand. That's what it means to be Comcast. So, while it's not surprising that there can be factions within, we will still rate whether Comcast is nice or nasty on an overall scale. The responsibility for this falls on upper management which oversees both the Customer Service Department and the Lie About Unlimited Bandwidth^W^W^W^WMarketing Department. If Customer Support wants to improve its image separate from the rest of Comcast, they can spin off into "Support-A-Tronics -- A Division of Comcast(TM)" and change their logo. Of course, I've heard quite a few not-so-good things on Slashdot about Customer Support itself.

In the same way, I disagree with people who keep saying that "companies aren't evil --just the people within them". As a whole, companies can indeed be evil, greedy, upstanding, etc, just as people can be evil, greedy, etc. even if you can break their actions down into component actions which, by themselves, are not inherently evil etc.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[Gerzel]

Exactly. It could be summed up as Commcast is listening to what is being said about it in public and trying to improve upon its services based on that.

This is more or less exactly how a good corporation should behave.

Re:Waste of public money.

[Fourier404]

It is outrageous for them to waste money combing through blogs to shut up complaints.

You make it sound like they're killing these people. They aren't wasting their money on ads, they're improving their image by providing better service, which is definitely something they're allowed to do.

Re:Is that you Comcast?

[budgenator]

So the way to get Comcast to preform customer service is to make your complaints public, but talking to them directly is a YMMV proposition. This seems almost narcissistic.